


you can't carry it with you (if you want to survive)

by shineyma



Series: did i fall asleep [1]
Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Season/Series 02
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-08
Updated: 2015-07-08
Packaged: 2018-04-08 09:48:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,416
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4300140
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shineyma/pseuds/shineyma
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jemma assumes, when she first realizes what she needs to do, that it’s going to be difficult. </p><p>Instead, it’s easy.</p>
            </blockquote>





	you can't carry it with you (if you want to survive)

**Author's Note:**

> Wooo! I am totally caught up on comments! Go me!
> 
> Okay, this fic takes place in the same 'verse as chapters 59 (["Did I fall asleep?"](http://archiveofourown.org/works/3595836/chapters/9464937)) and 64 (["You can't hide the truth forever, you know"](http://archiveofourown.org/works/3595836/chapters/9465039)) of my second prompt collection, but as it takes place beforehand, you shouldn't need to read those to understand it.
> 
> Title from Florence + The Machine's _Dog Days are Over_. Thanks for reading and, as always, please be gentle if you review!

Jemma assumes, when she first realizes what she needs to do, that it’s going to be difficult. She pictures trembling where she stands, imagines that her voice will waver, worries that she might lose her grip on the tears she seems constantly to be holding back these days.

Instead, it’s easy.

(She’s not entirely certain how she feels about it.)

Her hand is steady as she picks up the control tablet and sets the cell’s barrier to transparent, and when the blank white wall fades, leaving her a perfect view of Grant, she doesn’t flinch or back away.

She meets his eyes, evenly, and knows for a fact that none of the gaping emptiness in her chest shows on her face.

“Jemma,” he breathes, and crosses his tiny cell in three strides. “You’re okay?” Frantic eyes flicker over her in a quick scan. “Coulson wouldn’t say. Are you—”

“I’m fine,” she interrupts, sharply. Her voice doesn’t waver at all. “You made a decent attempt, but you failed to inflict any permanent damage…on me.”

Grant flinches, and her heart hammers against her ribs. This isn’t the first time she’s seen him since he dropped her and Fitz from the Bus, but it _is_ the first time he’s been aware for it. Saving his life while he was unconscious—or nearly so—and bleeding out right in front of her was easy.

Pale and delirious and unable to focus on her, he didn’t look so much like the lie of a man she fell in love with on the Bus.

Now, however…

“Sweetheart,” he says, voice wrapping around the endearment the same way it always has, “you have to know, that wasn’t—I wasn’t trying to kill you. I was trying to _save_ you. I know it was horrible—it was _cruel_ —but I needed you off the Bus. Garrett would’ve killed you, or worse, and I couldn’t let that happen.”

“You weren’t trying to kill us?” she demands. “It’s a _miracle_ we survived!”

“Sweetheart, no.” His voice is so sad that her heart actually twinges. “It was supposed to float. I was giving you your best chance; better in danger and away from Garrett than with Garrett and dead.”

“That would be more convincing if you weren’t the person who put us on that bloody plane in the first place,” she tells him. She means to be sharp; mostly, she thinks, she sounds exhausted. “Even if you didn’t anticipate Garrett ordering our deaths, you must have known that he wouldn’t be having us for tea. Violence was inevitable.”

He winces. “I never thought—”

“Stop,” she orders. He does. “I’m not here to listen to your excuses.”

“It’s not an excuse,” he insists, “it’s the truth.” The expression on his face isn’t one she’s ever seen from him before, but she believes the term _puppy eyes_ applies. “I _love_ you. I would never try to—”

She hits the tablet with more force is strictly necessary, but it gets the job done. Though his mouth keeps moving, with the barrier set to block sound, she can’t hear a word he’s saying.

“I’m not here to listen to you speak at all,” she says, and his mouth turns down in a frown. “I’ve muted the barrier. You can say as much as you like; I won’t hear a single word.”

His brow furrows, and though she’s never had any talent for reading lips—and imagines she’d have difficulty even if she did, considering the obstruction his beard offers—she can guess what question he’s asked easily enough.

“I’m here because I have something to say,” she says, and this time her voice _does_ waver. She takes a deep breath and forces her emotions aside—tamps down on the terrible mix of despair and grief and anger and fear rising in her throat.

Grant spreads his hands, clearly inviting her to speak, and her stomach knots at the sight of the bandages on his wrists. _She_ did that, stitched him together when he tore himself apart, and even now, two weeks since his last attempt, she can barely breathe through the shard in her lungs.

She’s showered dozens of times, but she can’t scrub away the feeling of his blood soaking through her jeans.

“I’m here,” she says, carefully, “to tell you that I forgive you.”

His eyes widen.

“It’s not because you deserve it,” she continues, hurriedly, before he can get any ideas. “And it’s not because I believe you’re genuinely remorseful. Don’t think I didn’t notice the complete lack of actual apology just now. If you’re sorry at all, it’s only that your actions led to your current circumstances, not for your actions themselves.”

He shakes his head, and she’s grateful for the barrier. She doesn’t want to know what words might accompany the expression he’s wearing, the painful sincerity in his eyes.

He’s an accomplished liar who’s made his living from faking sincerity—when he wasn’t making it by ending lives, that is. She can’t believe anything she sees from him, no matter how much she’d like to.

“I forgive you,” she says, and then, again, “I forgive you.”

The words are bitter on her tongue, but they ease something in her anyway.

“I forgive you,” she says, a third time, “but that’s for me. Not for you.”

He tilts his head in question, eyes fixed on her face, and she stiffens her spine in resolve.

“There’s something I have to do,” she tells him—and that’s all she’ll be telling him. He doesn’t need to know that she’s about to go undercover, that his very presence is chasing her away from the Playground and into enemy territory. “It’s going to be difficult—dangerous—and I can’t do it if I’ve got everything you did weighing on my shoulders. So.” She inhales slowly. “So I’m letting it go and I’m forgiving you. For all the people you killed, for betraying us, for kidnapping Skye and nearly killing Fitz and me—I forgive you.”

The expression he’s wearing—an odd combination of earnest and sorrowful—is too much to bear. She turns away to set the control tablet back on its stand.

“That’s all I had to say,” she informs the chair behind the stand. “I’m going, now.”

His eyes burn into her back as she leaves. She’s proud of herself; she doesn’t turn back even once.

\---

The confrontation isn’t the only thing that’s easier than she expects it to be.

It shouldn’t be simple to _actually_ forgive him. Deciding she needs to and then telling him that she has doesn’t erase everything he did, and it certainly doesn’t erase the effects. Her claustrophobia doesn’t disappear, and neither do her nightmares. The urge to cry persists, as does the panicked racing of her heart.

She’s still terrified, and she doesn’t know that she’ll ever _not_ be—which is exactly what she expects. What she _doesn’t_ expect is for it to be so easy to let go of her hate.

His betrayal has been her fuel, the driving force behind everything she’s done since the moment she found Eric Koenig stuffed in a vent with his trachea crushed. She thinks it will be impossible to let go of, that she’ll have to work at it, pry it out of her bones and the very depths of her soul before she can move past it.

Instead, it slips through her fingers as quickly as a handful of water.

Perhaps it’s that she’s undercover, that there’s serious distance between them for the first time since he was brought to the Playground. Without the knowledge that he’s just beneath her feet gnawing away at her, his crimes don’t seem so _immediate_. They could have happened years ago, rather than weeks or months.

It’s simply not so pressing when he’s not _right there_ …though there are, of course, reminders of him; even setting aside the obvious HYDRA connection, it seems that every specialist she encounters (thankfully few) knows her more as Grant Ward’s girlfriend than as one half of FitzSimmons.

And that, though puzzling—as she was the former for five months, at most, and the latter for a decade—turns out to be a godsend.

Less than two weeks into her assignment, she happens to catch the attention of a fairly high-ranked field agent. He propositions her and, when she politely refuses him, becomes quite belligerent. For the next three days he is a constant thorn in her side, and by the end of the week, she’s truly beginning to fear for her own safety—and for good reason.

Late one afternoon, he corners her in an empty corridor, backing her against the wall. Though she fears the possible repercussions, she’s considering turning to drastic measures—namely, the loaded gun in her handbag—when, unexpectedly, someone takes care of the problem for her.

A hand clamps down on the agent’s shoulder and pulls him away from her, sending him flying into the opposite wall. He hits it face first, with a heavy _thud_ , and, unable to catch his balance, falls backward to the ground. She can’t contain a wince at the sound his head makes as it slams against the tile, but there is, admittedly, something very satisfying about it.

“You okay, Simmons?” her rescuer asks, and Jemma blinks up at him.

He’s very handsome, dressed in tactical gear, and—most relevantly—a complete stranger. That leaves a knot of unease in her stomach; HYDRA isn’t the sort of place where one finds good Samaritans. It’s not likely that this man, whoever he is, has helped her solely out of the goodness of his heart.

“Yes, I’m fine,” she says, a touch breathlessly. Her heart is hammering in her throat. “Thank you…?”

“Hicks,” he supplies when she trails off. “And it’s no problem.”

“What the _fuck_ , Hicks,” the field agent (all week he’s been bothering her, and not once has he offered his name) asks, pushing himself to his feet. “I saw her first!”

Jemma knows a brief moment of terror—Hicks is a specialist if ever she’s seen one, which means she’s not likely to be able to reach her gun before he stops her; if he’s only rescued her because he himself means her harm, she’s in a great deal of trouble—before Hicks turns a disgusted look on the field agent.

“Don’t you know who this is?” he asks.

“She’s one of the lab rats,” the field agent says. (Considering the circumstances, the level of offense Jemma feels at the term is probably slightly absurd.) “So what?”

Hicks rolls his eyes. “This is Grant Ward’s girlfriend, you dumbass. Anything happens to her, we’re _all_ dead.”

She takes a moment to absorb this—that her connection to Grant is enough to earn her the protection of a specialist she’s never so much as laid eyes on before—as the field agent scoffs.

“So what?” he repeats, though he looks somewhat unsettled. “I heard Ward was dead.”

“That really a risk you wanna take, Lorenzo?” Hicks asks. “’Cause I sure as hell don’t.” He jerks his head towards the doors at the end of the corridor. “Now get lost, and don’t bother Simmons again.”

The field agent—Lorenzo—is tense, and for a moment Jemma fears he’s going to press the issue. Luckily, however, he simply rolls his shoulders and turns away with a dismissive sneer.

“Whatever,” is his parting comment.

Still, she doesn’t relax until he’s disappeared through the door, at which point she exhales heavily and slumps back against the wall. Hicks pats her on the head, and somehow, though it certainly should be, it’s not condescending at all.

“You okay?” he asks again.

“Fine,” she says. “I wasn’t looking forward to the consequences of shooting him, that’s all.”

He laughs—loudly.

“Of course you were gonna shoot him,” he says, shaking his head. “Guess I shouldn’t expect anything less from Ward’s girl.”

“I’m sorry,” she says, “have we met?”

She knows they haven’t—she has an excellent memory for faces—but she’s hoping to prompt an explanation of precisely how he knows that she and Grant used to date.

“Nope,” he says. “But Ward put the word out months ago that you were off-limits, and I don’t think a little uprising is enough to change that.” He grins. “Better safe than sorry, right?”

“Quite,” she agrees, mouth dry.

He _put the word out_? What does that mean? It can’t have been for his cover, can it? If she’d heard of him doing such a thing before she knew the truth of him, she would have deemed it far out of character. He was too sweet, too reserved, to publicize their relationship in such a way.

But if not for his cover, why would he do it?

“I gotta jet,” Hicks says, checking his wristwatch. “But, hey.” He pins her with a serious look. “Anyone else bothers you, you let me know, okay? I’ll take care of it for you. Well,” he adds thoughtfully, “any of us will, really. But I’m on restricted duty, so I’m around the most. Thirty-second floor.”

“Thank you,” she says. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

He pats her on the head again. “See that you do.”

With that, he departs, leaving Jemma alone in the corridor to mull over her several dozen new questions.

Perhaps the incident—or, more precisely, the knowledge it gives her, that Grant laid _claim_ to her as though he had any right, so strenuously that even his fellow specialists fear to dispute it—should make it harder to release her anger at him.

It doesn’t. _Nothing_ does.

Whatever the reason, though the fear remains settled in her lungs, hampering her breathing at odd moments, the rest of her negative emotions regarding him—hate, anger, betrayal, disgust—seem to fade away the moment she decides to let them go. Not _completely_ , admittedly, but the remnants are only that: remnants, tiny fragments of what they used to be. Like specks of dirt stubbornly clinging to her hands, they’re minor irritants in comparison to the mountain she carried on her shoulders before.

It’s so easy.

And it’s not necessarily good.

She fully believes what she told Grant, that she can’t afford to carry her hate for him with her into HYDRA. On that hand, the ease with which she lets go of it is a boon.

On the other hand, it seems that in addition to fueling her, his betrayal was holding back a whole flood of other emotions. And once her hate is gone, the others are free to wash over her.

She misses him.

All things considered, they didn’t have very long together. A few months as friends and teammates, a few weeks in an awkward in-between stage, and then a few months as a couple—she’s had relationships consisting solely of casual sex that lasted longer, and she let go of those easily enough. But somehow Grant got under her skin and made himself at home in her heart, and his absence, now that she’s forgiven him, is a terrible burden.

She sleeps alone in her too-large bed and eats alone in her too-large kitchen and walks to work alone in the too-wide world, and she misses him every second. She wakes from nightmares of falling with no one to hold her, wakes from nightmares of drowning longing for the man who almost doomed her to it, and she feels hollow and awful every second of every day.

The worst part is that she can’t push past it. She misses the others as well, of course, misses Fitz like a lost limb, Skye like her sister, Trip and May and Coulson in their own distinct and important ways, but all of that she works through—sets aside for private moments—in order to focus on her mission.

But she has to _use_ the way she misses Grant. After all, as far as HYDRA is concerned, she _should_ be missing him. They know of her relationship with him, as evidenced by Hicks, and for whatever reason, they’re well pleased with it. Her superiors believe that Grant has disappeared, so naturally they _expect_ her to miss him—to worry about him and to ask after their search.

It’s so vital to her cover that it becomes part of her daily routine; at the end of every work day, after hanging up her lab coat and clearing her workstation, she travels up nine floors to the first of the Operations offices to speak to the field coordinator.

Every day, she asks, “Has there been any news?”

Every day, she receives a sympathetic smile and a pat on the shoulder from said field coordinator, one Julia Stuart.

“Not yet,” Stuart says. “But don’t give up yet, Simmons. He’s one of the best; it’ll take more than a few SHIELD agents to outmatch Grant Ward.”

And every day, she smiles through tears that, as time passes, become increasingly genuine.

“Of course,” she says. “Until tomorrow, then.”

“Hopefully we’ll have better news for you then,” Stuart offers. “Have a nice night.”

After the habitual conversation, Jemma will leave the building, letting the dread of her empty apartment with its empty bed and empty kitchen fill her up as she goes. The mirrored doors of the lift prove the effectiveness of the tactic; she makes a horribly pathetic picture—every inch the frantic, grieving girlfriend.

And how can she _not_ miss Grant when she has to wallow in her longing for him?

In the end, it’s almost a relief when her cover is burned and she’s extracted back to the Playground.

\---

The relief, unfortunately, only lasts as long as it takes her to realize that as easy it was to let go of her hate for him, it’s impossible to pick it back up again. Even when he escapes—even when he kills a handful of FBI agents, his own brother, and his own _parents_ —all she can do is miss him.

And fear him—but that, too, begins to fade in the face of his actions after escaping. Lorenzo, the HYDRA agent of fairly high rank who threatened and terrified her before Hicks’ intervention, is found dead the week after Grant’s escape, an _Eranthis hyemalis_ —winter aconite, her favorite—flower resting on his bloody corpse. The next day, there’s another body.

And then another.

“Every time I think he can’t get creepier,” Skye says, staring with horrified fascination as, on the feed from the Quinjet’s forward camera, Trip and May approach the fourth corpse in as many days, “he goes and proves me wrong.”

“He does have a talent for it,” Coulson agrees, and squeezes Jemma’s shoulder. “Simmons, you don’t have to watch this if you don’t want to.”

“Thank you, sir,” she says. She hugs her tablet to her chest to disguise the fact that her hands _aren’t_ shaking. “But I’m fine.”

“All right,” he says, “but you can leave at any time. Okay?”

He thinks she’s disgusted. They all think she’s disgusted.

“Thank you,” she repeats.

On screen, May shakes her head. “No ID on the body.”

“Sending picture for facial rec now,” Trip says, aiming his phone at the corpse.

After a moment, the picture appears on the screen next to the feed from the Quinjet. Jemma’s breath catches.

“You know this one, too?” Skye asks, quiet and sympathetic.

“Yes,” she says, eyes fixed on the screen. “Martin Wilcox. He sabotaged the results of one of the first experiments I did for HYDRA—blatantly. If I hadn’t had a very solid alibi, I may well have been killed for it.”

“Well, at least he’s consistent,” Coulson mutters—presumably referring to the fact that each of the corpses they’ve discovered has belonged to a person who wronged her. “I’ll give him that.”

His hand is still on her shoulder. He’s trying to be supportive—reassuring.

She wishes she needed it.

She _wants_ to be disgusted by this, by bodies left as _gifts_ , by the man who attempts to…to _woo_ her through murder. She should be disgusted—would have been, she knows, not long ago.

But she’s not.

Instead, her fear fades. (He’s leaving her _gifts_. That must mean he really does care, mustn’t it?) Her longing for Grant increases. Her stomach remains unturned.

By the time circumstances force the team into working with Grant once more, the only thing she fears is her own heart—and the sway he holds over it.


End file.
